'Family Reunion' by Jacopo Mazzetti at Plasma, Milan

Welcome

I followed the genesis of this project just like I watched Jacopo grow. In the meantime, Jacopo’s family su ered a few blows: it fell apart, came back together, fell apart again – as families are wont to do. Jacopo was overwhelmed by these blows, despite not having remotely caused any of them... And o en – he is the eldest of three brothers – he found himself having to play the referee... I write all that because I want to lay the cards on the table at once, so that this project doesn’t – despite Jacopo and his turbulent blood relations – end up being interpreted as a cele- bration of the values of “hearth and home,” and still less as a representation of a family nucleus. It is a “family,” yes, but of works. ere are “ e ancestors,” who may or may not be Jacopo’s grandparents; “ e living”; and “ e descendents” – but Jacopo isn’t even a dad... Nor should we assume that these works were born from one another, or that they were born in the order suggested by the disposition of the family tree. Historically speaking, the rst to arrive were in fact “ e living”: bedcovers made of retrore ective cloth. On one side of each cover, Jacopo has printed a pattern that he generated by fusing an image of a meteorite with that of a crystal. e technology employed for the print is peculiar: it’s called “dye-sublimation printing,” implying that the transfer of color from the printer to the support happens through the emission of heat – the ink is brought to high temperatures and soaks into the cloth by sublimation. I’ve slept under one of these covers. Many times. O cially, for seven nights in the context of an artist’s residency in Florence, in Villa Romana to be precise, which Jacopo has been organizing since 2011 and which is called “A Bed is a Door.” e idea is that, mixed with the “emulsions” of meteorites and crystals, the retrore ection of the cloth can stimulate dream activity and retain its products. During those seven days in Villa Romana I slept and wrote a great deal... e cover e ectively functioned like a spatio-temporal door onto a reality other than my daily one. In the “family” of works, “ e living” are suspended mid-air – as in the REM phase, they are asleep and yet supre- mely active. ey form a pentagon that creates a continuous surface on which “ e descendents” can be projected, like the potential gures that they are. “ e descendents” appear in the form of holographic haloes produced by simple light-emitting diodes – pure energy. e pentagon is like a chapel and, rightly enough, contains “ e ancestors.” ese are true funereal sculptures. A base in marble or granite – widespread cemetery materials – oats on a surface of water. e graveyard is like a Japanese garden, an environment not dry but alive. e bases support tenta- cular objects. eir surface too appears mineral. Seen from above, they look like the letters of an alien alphabet, or otherwise labyrinth plants, or... Jacopo talks to me about exoskeletons and lymphatic systems: conductors – and indeed it soon becomes clear that they are tangles of tubes. An acqueous vapor comes out of their extremities. e dead breathe? eir souls gradually di- sperse from their bodies? Adolfo Wildt 2.0. But also a wink or two at Giacinto Cerone... On top of the lymphatic forms/systems, in correspondence with the sexual glands, Jacopo places jewels – gi s. And so, from the dead to the nascent, the circle of life closes and reopens. Jacopo thinks of his show as a funeral, a wedding and a baptism... in a blender. Even though the show, as such, would be enough for a rite... In any case, welcome

— Michele (D’Aurizio)